Theater Review: New Rep has mother-daughter issues

The New Repertory Theatre in Watertown is currently launching its inaugural Next Rep Black Box Festival with Ellen McLaughlin’s "Tongue of a Bird," the story of a search-and-rescue pilot looking for a missing girl in the Adirondacks, which often seems to get lost in its own dense prose.

During the search, Maxine (Elizabeth Anne Rimar), the pilot, makes base camp at the home of her decidedly grounded grandmother (Bobbi Steinbach) and sets out on rescue missions, often accompanied by the lost child’s mother (Ilyse Robbins). During the course of the search, we are also introduced to the ghosts of the young girl, Charlotte (Claudia Q. Nolan), and of Maxine’s own mother, Evie (Olivia D’Ambrosia). The search for Charlotte soon becomes one of self-discovery for Maxine, as she sorts through the emotional pain and longing of her own life stemming from her mother’s suicide.

The five actresses, representing four generations of mothers and daughters, bring skill and talent to their roles. Rimar imbues her stalwart Maxine – with a perfect career success rate – with the haunting uncertainty that comes from her mother having taken her own life. Adopting the accent of her Polish refugee character, the always affecting Steinbach is a fireplug of sometimes brutal honesty as she challenges her granddaughter, grapples with her own grief, and leaves you to wonder what role she played in her daughter’s fate. As the mother of the missing girl, Robbins perfectly conveys the heartbreaking struggle between hopefulness and rapidly encroaching fear. Nolan is just what a 12-year-old should be – engaging, funny, and full of youthful energy. And D’Ambrosia, garbed like the ghost of Amelia Earhart, does her best with a character that is improbably both ethereal and verbose.

McLaughlin, an actress and playwright best known for having originated the part of the Angel in Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning "Angels in America" and appearing in every production from its earliest workshops through its Broadway run, may have wanted this play to be her own elegiac treatise – this one on mother-and-daughter relationships. She attempts to cover a lot of territory in two acts and just under two hours. Her explorations of the complex relationships between these, and virtually all, mothers and daughters are intriguing, stepping off from potentially interesting angles, but ultimately prove unsatisfying. If you know someone like one of these women, you will relate to their stories. If not, the play will leave you wanting clearer insights that McLaughlin’s writing just doesn’t provide.

Maxine’s statement to Charlotte about the "thin line between hope and despair," as she points across the stage toward a strip of a light behind the chair where her grandmother is mostly stationed, may have been the rationale for the linear staging and perhaps also Courtney Nelson’s abstract set. The intimacy of the Black Box – with a narrow stage flanked by audience bleachers on two sides – seems, however, to have both creatively and literally constrained director Emily Ranii, who has her cast moving monotonously throughout.

Page 2 of 2 - Only late in the action, when Evie removes her cap and shakes loose her long hair to rejoin her daughter in flight, does the play seem close to achieving its goal of freeing some of these troubled characters from the weights of their various worlds. By then, though, it is just too late.